Bike­to­ber­fest 2012

Today is the start of Bike­to­ber­fest 2012 in Day­tona Beach, FL. It’s the smaller brother to Bike Week, which oddly enough lasts longer than a week. I was just review­ing my pho­tos from pre­vi­ous events like this one, and I’m mostly dis­ap­pointed. There are plenty of shots that doc­u­ment the nature of the place, from wild char­ac­ters to wild activ­ity (some of which is likely best not posted here). How­ever, I don’t have any that I’ve worked to cap­ture the essence of the peo­ple, the place or the event.

Usu­ally, I just dis­miss this by say­ing “I don’t shoot events”, but there’s more to it. It’s prob­a­bly more accu­rate to say that I suck at shoot­ing events, and I’d like to work on improv­ing that prob­lem dur­ing Bike­to­ber­fest 2012. Let me give you an exam­ple. Let’s take a look at the Biker dude below.

This guy is a char­ac­ter and I didn’t do him jus­tice. It was a quick snap, but a poor one. There’s a big shadow across his face that I could have cor­rected by hav­ing him turn slightly into the sun­light. There’s a clut­tered back­ground, although it shows that biker events are clut­tered places. Basi­cally, it’s a snap­shot in a place. Hav­ing spent some time this year at the Star Wars Cel­e­bra­tion, I’m finally start­ing to under­stand how its sim­i­lar to Biketoberfest.

• There are pas­sion­ate peo­ple who dress up for the event
• There are plenty of scenes that could make a good stage, if you pay attention
• There are cool vehi­cles just wait­ing for the right per­son to pose
• Plenty of peo­ple there have weapons

That last one is a bit touchy. While the folks at Star Wars had plas­tic guns and plas­tic sticks shaped like blades, bik­ers have real guns and real blades. Not all of them, but enough that every­one there is quite cour­te­ous to strangers.

My sched­ule is a bit lim­ited for Bike­to­ber­fest 2012, but I’m going to see if I can get a cou­ple of decent scenes or por­traits this time around. The weather looks good for this week­end. Let’s just hope I don’t drop my Nikon off my Harley.